Filmmaker Sam Green presents a live, work-in-progress screening of his new film project Utopia in Four Movements. Part lecture, part documentary, this piece explores the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the 21st century through several seemingly unrelated vignettes — including a history of Esperanto, a portrait of an exiled American radical, and a meditation on the world’s largest shopping mall. Green narrates Utopia in person and uses PowerPoint to cue images while San Francisco musician Dave Cerf performs a live soundtrack. Drawing on performative practices such as Benshi, the travelogue, and the public lecture, Utopia in Four Movements uses the collective experience of cinema as a starting point for a meditation on the value of the utopian and its problematic nature in an era without big ideas.

Sam Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. Green received his master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His most recent film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His other award-winning documentaries include lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight '69. Green has received grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Foundations. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute.